Roughly 1.5 years since this topic was started, I'm afraid Upwork is not actually looking into the option of adding Transferwise... I too am getting sick of losing about 2.5% of my hard-earned money every time I make a transfer with Paypal. This month I basically worked an hour and a half to pay conversion fees!

Actually TransferWise just launched their Borderless account which would be perfect for this! Can we make this happen soon? I'm tired of Paypal that restricts people by the country they created their account in.

There was a Q&A forum session yesterday and of course this topic was raised. I got a reply from Upwork's Payment Product Lead who said the following:

Thanks for the feedback. We have heard the same concern from some of the other freelancers as well. We have escalated the concern with our current processing partner, Transfast.com. We are actively working on this issue and identifying solutions to address the freelancer concerns. Expect some positive changes this year related to this topic.

Thanks.

Aneetha (Payment Product Lead)

So, as long as you have access in your Upwork account to add a Direct to Local Bank payment, that uses the Transfast.com service, which seems to be pretty much the same thing as TransferWise.com. Currently, they have an issue with Transfast.com that they use a much lower rate (e.g. last week on 17 May, my transfer from Upwork according to Upwork's generated email used a USD/RON rate of 3.94, while the rate from xe.com (world's authority on exchange rates) was between 4.09 and 4.25, closing at 4.10). According to Aneetha this should be corrected soon this year.

I don't know if Direct to Local Bank is available to absolutely everyone in Upwork but it's a step forward to see Upwork is using something like TransferWise.com.

I tried leaving a URL but it got deleted by the moderators. Bottom line is that Upwork and TransferWise work great together. For all the details on how I got that all set up you could search my name on google: Andrei Condurachi and then visit my site for the full article on Upwork + Transferwise.